Welcome
to the Pocket Monsters Special
page
of
the Manga
section!Pocket Monsters Special
(ポケットモンスターSPECIAL) began publication in Japan in 1997. The
series follows the plots of each main series game and features
characters and concepts not found in many other adaptations of the
games' stories. It is one of the longest running and most popular
Pocket Monsters manga
series.

The series has a confusing release history in Japan. Different
chapters are printed in different magazines in the same month, often
out of order. These chapters are eventually put in the correct
order for the graphic novel releases, which usually don't come out
until at least a year later. Regardless, fans of the series
continue to try to piece the story together because of their love of
its writing and the way it handles the material from the games.
The series is being released in the U.S. under the title Pokémon Adventures. It was first released
in 1999 in single comic book issues that were later collected in
graphic novels. Viz kept this up for seven volumes before
canceling the series in 2003 with the end of the Yellow arc. In
2006, Viz
released two "best of" volumes, presumably as a test run to see if there was still
interest in Pokémon manga. A list of the chapters included
in
these "best of" books can be found here.
Three years later, Viz
started a new release of the series, starting over from the first
volume. This
re-release was unflipped and included translations of the extra
material that had
been skipped over in the first printings. It also featured
slightly more strict editing. After Viz finished the Gold and
Silver storyline, they decided to jump ahead to the Diamond & Pearl
storyline, renaming the title Pokémon
Adventures Diamond and Pearl Platinum and presenting it as a new
series. At around the same time, the company began to release
graphic novels from the Black and White storylines under the title Pokémon Black and White.
They would later return to the Ruby & Sapphire storyline, picking
up where they left off with the volume numbering. Their
collection of stories from the HeartGold
& SoulSilver era however, started the volume numbering back
at one.